At the Moons (/Solar Flares) v2.3 Palestine, students, radio, and Canada Post

Some updates on things you are probably interested in

Author

greg macdougall
May 10, 2024

Greetings,

It’s 48 hours since the new moon,
and it’s now almost time for the solar flares’ arrival
(peak opportunity to see northern lights is apparently 11pm-2am tonight, Fri-Sat).

A shorter newsletter this time around:

On Palestine

Again with the students’ uprising:

(a) I did some recordings of the WKCR-FM Columbia University student radio the night of the police raids there; their web servers crashed from too much traffic, and I was able to ‘mirror’ some of it as a livestream on Youtube.

The recordings and additional context is in this post:

*: The additional context includes Macklemore’s new song for the student protests, entitled Hind’s Hall, which you should listen to if you haven’t yet.

(b) I’ll be putting together a post with info specifically on the UOttawa student encampment at Tabaret Lawn. I’ll have it up by tomorrow.

It’ll either be at this link, or if I make a new post, I’ll link to it from that one.

Note that Monday there is a Canada-wide call for strike in support of the student encampments.

One issue is when all the communications are on Instragram, it means that there are a lot of people who can’t follow much of it. This post will help with that, a bit.

Segue

Related to both the above and the below (i.e. section 2):

There was a young woman who visited the library tent at the camp while I was there, and they didn’t have any books specifically about Palestine for her to borrow - the main library person said that they put all the Palestine books right at the front, since they always go quick.

I had brought some print-outs of the preview draft I’ve written, about the Israeli real estate events in Canada w.r.t. international law: I made a one-page double-sided PDF for use as a handout, so was able to give her something relevant to read.

My next visit, I also brought some donations for the library - three Upping The Anti journals that had relevant content. One of those relevant contents was this roundtable interview on the BDS movement in Canada (circa 2009), and one of those in the roundtable is Dave Bleakney of CUPW, the postal workers union - also someone who we worked with a fair bit in our group IPSMO, Indigenous Peoples Solidarity Movement Ottawa.

Canada Post

The segue from Palestine to CUPW brings us to Canada Post, which you may have heard in the news recently:

They’ve announced they’ve lost money for six consecutive years and at this rate can maintain operations for less than a year more.

Postal banking

One particular important thing to recognize in this context, is the potential for postal banking.

It is a long-pushed idea, and it is implement and works in other places.

The idea is that a publicly-owned banking service is created and run through the postal infrastructure.

So you can imagine, instantly all small communities that have a post office, now have a bank - the lack of which can be a big problem.

Also it will offer a better alternative to expensive services of private pay day loans and money wire transfers services.

Not to mention, it will also make Canada Post a more viable operation.

I did a video interview in 2014, with two people: the National Postal Logistics Organiser with the EPMU union in New Zealand, where they have postal banking operating successfully, as well as the author of a report for CCPA (Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives) about the possibility of postal banking in Canada.

Check it out, along with the additional linked content also included in the post too:

I’ve got more to say re: Canada Post, but that will wait until maybe next newsletter…

Bonus photo(s):

Two eggs I found at the bottom of a tree one morning. There was no sign of a nest above, and the first branch was over 12 feet above the ground. The second photo was from a few hours later, with one of the eggs eaten. The third photo is from even later in the day - from a different perspective, with the second egg also eaten. I assume it was a squirrel(s) who ate the eggs; a larger animal would’ve eaten both at once. I did briefly consider if I could do something to save the eggs, but that would require a lot of work to raise to baby birds without their parents - for whomever would do it - and sometimes it’s better to let nature take its course.